As the forum of Democratic candidates came to order Tuesday evening in the old town hall in the little town of Ashford, the party had not yet blown but was rather still in the process of blowing its can't-miss opportunity just a few miles away, across the state line in Massachusetts. To use a sports analogy, the ground ball was still scooting across the infield grass, headed in the direction of Bill Buckner.

(Mass. Dems, if she happens to be sitting near you, be so kind as to explain that reference to Martha Coakley.)

The Obvious weighed heavily across the brows of the otherwise cheerful Democrats in the room, waiting for one of the candidates climbing to the microphone to state it.

Fittingly, that candidate was Attorney General Richard Blumenthal, who will seek his party's nomination for the U.S. Senate this summer and then try not to choke, as his Massachusetts contemporary, Coakley, formally conceded doing a little more than an hour later across the border.

"This race will tighten," said Blumenthal, who currently enjoys sky-high approval ratings, and is clobbering Democratic challenger Merrick Alpert and three potential Republican rivals in recent polls, all by double-digit margins. "It will be contentious, and it should be -- it's a United States Senate race. And we have only to look across the border to see the dangers of complacency."

Blumenthal wasn't done, and while he didn't single out Coakley by name, his remarks echoed the criticism throughout the Democratic Party of the Coakley organization's lackadaisical early campaigning and near-constant gaffes. The Democrats, including President Barack Obama, battled helplessly in the final weeks before the special election to fill the seat once held by the late Sen. Edward Kennedy, but were unable to help her turn away a furious late surge by Republican Scott Brown.

"The other lesson is that everyone seeking or holding public office has an obligation to be out there listening to people, working for them, earning their support each and every day," Blumenthal said, then invoked the late Speaker Tip O'Neill, a Democrat and contemporary of Kennedy's in the Massachusetts delegation.

"As a speaker of the House, a Massachusetts representative, once said, all politics is local," said Blumenthal, smiling. "I really hope Massachusetts politics is local.

He can smile, for now. For other Connecticut Democrats, like Rep. Joe Courtney, D-2nd District, the local congressman who got a huge ovation at the mention of his name in Ashford, new troubles await after the Coakley collapse. With the Democrats' 60-vote majority in the Senate eliminated, and Brown elected on a promise to defeat efforts to reform the health care system, Democrats will have to cobble together a different compromise to get a health care bill passed.

The quickest and simplest way would be for the House of Representatives, which passed a more ambitious reform bill, to simply pass the version already approved by the Senate, and then to attempt later alterations to reflect the deals struck in recent weeks. But as Courtney, a ringleader of House Democratic opposition to the Senate's proposed excise tax on "high value" health benefits, has said repeatedly that that would be a "tough sell."

In an interview the other night, Courtney said he didn't even want to consider the possibility that Coakley would lose, plunging a health care debate that was on the very edge of a deal back into uncertainty. But that's where he and the rest of the Democrats are now.